By the Editor.

IF there be truth in the old saying, Inter arma silent leges, it is not less true that inter arma silent MusÆ. When the attention of the public is taken up with “wars and rumours of wars,” abroad or at home, and when at home political parties have broken out into open strife, there is no chance for the Muses or their votaries to get a hearing. To no other cause can I ascribe the fact that my countrymen and countrywomen made no response, or next to none, when they were lately asked by the Mayor of Lichfield, Dr. Johnson’s native city, whether the centenary of his death should be celebrated, and if so, then how?

For the last three months and more the English world has been so occupied with the pros and cons of Mr. Gladstone’s Franchise Bill, that to the above appeal society has turned a deaf ear. I regret it, but I am scarcely surprised. We have not forgotten to observe the centenary of Robert Raikes, as the reputed founder of Sunday-schools; it is not so very long since the centenary of Robert Burns was celebrated, not by the Scottish people only, but by Englishmen, at the Crystal Palace and elsewhere; but, shame to write and to say it, there is no response when Englishmen are asked to commemorate the author of the first really good English Dictionary, the author of the best collection of Lives of our English Poets, the man who almost in defiance of the law, and at the risk of a prosecution, first really called into existence the practice of reporting the Debates of Parliament; the greatest practical philosopher and teacher of the last century; the man who first raised and ennobled the profession of the pen; and the man who twice at least stood up, as few have stood up, on behalf of that profession, firstly, when he flung back with contempt the tardily offered favour and “patronage” of Lord Chesterfield, and, secondly, when he knocked down the insolent publisher, Thomas Osborne, in his own shop, with one of his own folio volumes. Is not such a man, I ask, deserving of a Centenary celebration from his brethren of the pen, or, let me say, rather from his sons and disciples?

But to be serious. There can be little doubt that if all that he said, and wrote, and did, be fairly considered, few men can claim credit for having lived more useful lives than Dr. Johnson. Long before the end of that life arrived, King George III. had spontaneously borne testimony to his merits by the gift, rare at that time, of a literary pension, adding a graceful compliment: “I should perhaps have thought that you had written enough, if you had not written so well.” Born in humble, though not needy circumstances, unable to complete his education and to obtain an Oxford degree by the res angusta domi, he came to London to fight the battle of life, his only weapon being his pen, and he won the day against all difficulties, the cold indifference of the rich, the jealousies of his equals and contemporaries, and the heart-breaking and niggardly doles of the London publishers. Undaunted by these and other difficulties, he showed Edmund Cave how his new venture, the Gentleman’s Magazine, might come to deserve its name on other grounds than that alleged at first, viz., that it was not fit for any lady to read it. He raised, by his essays and biographical sketches, the whole style and character of that which in the middle of the last century was one of the leading organs of the time, when the daily papers as yet were not, and the country gentleman’s household had to depend for the news of the day on the “news-letter” written specially for their amusement and information. Till Johnson took the matter in hand, and set himself to supply the want by a new method which his native wit suggested, the country knew not one iota of the speeches delivered in the Houses of Parliament; the legislation of the country was carried on in the dark, so far as concerned the people at large. If he had done nothing else than this, Dr. Johnson would deserve, at the very least, the honour of a statue on the Thames Embankment, or of a scholarship bearing his name at Pembroke College, Oxford, the scene of his early struggles.

I am not intending to write a life of Dr. Johnson. That has been done with wondrous fidelity and graphic skill by his fidus Achates, James Boswell; and Sir John Hawkins and Mrs. Thrale-Piozzi, in their supplemental Memoirs and Recollections of him, have thrown most interesting and valuable side-lights on his character. Boswell’s “Life of Dr. Johnson,” as every reader of English literature knows, was largely amplified, and most cruelly distorted, by John Wilson Croker, who, though himself a Tory of Tories, seems to have been unable to comprehend the character of the man who hated a Whig almost as much as he hated a Scotchman; and Mr. Croker was almost as cruelly punished for his offence by Macaulay, who cut his book into shreds in the Edinburgh Review. Still, in spite of its glaring sins, not certainly of omission, but of commission, Croker’s edition of Boswell will always be a work of value, for he entered on his task before the last of Dr. Johnson’s friends and acquaintances had passed away. Amongst these were Lord Stowell, who figures in Boswell as “Dr. Scott of Doctors’ Commons;” Mr. John Sidney Hawkins, and Miss Letitia Hawkins, the son and daughter of Sir John Hawkins; Mr. Fitzherbert (afterwards Lord St. Helen’s); Miss Monckton, the Lady Cork of the Regency, a “Queen of Society” under George IV. and William IV., and who lived into the reign of Victoria. He knew also Mrs. Thrale’s daughter, the venerable Lady Keith; and last, not least, the still more venerable Dr. Routh, President of Magdalen College, who had seen Dr. Johnson in the flesh at Oxford, and who lived to December, 1854. From these and from other sources he gathered much material which had not been available to Boswell, and had he been content with facts instead of probabilities and possibilities, he would doubtless have been proof and unassailable to Macaulay’s pen. For instance, there is not the shadow of a ground for supposing (as he does) that Dr. Johnson was “out in ’45” with the adherents of Charles Edward, except the fact that in that year his pen was idle; and he is still less justified in supposing that Dr. Johnson was a Roman Catholic because he advocated the principle of pilgrimages, and prayers for the dead, and confession, as natural and right in themselves, and as distinct from their abuses; because there is not a single Roman Catholic tenet, except that of the divinely-appointed Primacy of the See of St. Peter, which has not at one time or another been supported and defended by some Protestant writer.

Dr. Johnson, it must be owned even by his adversaries, has left his mark upon the literature of his country. Gibbon’s style is most ornate, but it is cumbrous and unnatural, and the author of the “Decline and Fall” has found no one to copy him. It was otherwise with Johnson. He was fond of Ciceronian Latin, and his English smacked as strongly of the Ciceronian flavour as did Dr. Pusey’s style of the Augustinian. For myself, I infinitely prefer the short and simple words which come from the Anglo-Saxon mint to what is now sneeringly called “Johnsonese.” But I cannot shut my eyes to that “union of perspicuity and splendour,” that nervous vigour, that “expansion and harmony” which mark the stately flow of Johnson when he is at his best. Towards the end of every unmutilated edition of Boswell’s “Life” is given a list of those who in earnest or in jest have set themselves to imitate the burly Doctor’s style. Foremost amongst these are the historians Robertson and Gibbon, the Rev. Dr. Nares, George Colman, Professor Young, of Glasgow, the Rev. Dr. Knox, the popularity of whose writings is ascribed to this very feature, and some of the best contributors to the old Edinburgh Mirror. There is no doubt also that Dr. Johnson’s style was very largely but almost insensibly copied and reproduced in the sermons, charges, and essays of most Bishops and dignitaries of the Established Church for some sixty or seventy years after his death. In fact, Dr. Johnson may be said in a very great degree to have “tuned their pulpits.” It is only of later years, concurrently with the study of German and of Anglo-Saxon literature in this country, that a simpler and less stilted style has prevailed. And this is no small testimony to the great powers of the “learned lexicographer.”

The value of his Dictionary has, of course, declined since the study of Etymology has been raised to the dignity of a science; for Dr. Johnson knew little or nothing of those primitive languages from which all the European languages are derived, and of which they are at the root only variations and dialects. His Dictionary, therefore, must be judged by the standard of a century ago, not by that of the Victorian Era. Were Dr. Johnson now alive, he would be among the first to say to Professor Skeat, to Max MÜller, and our other lexicographers, “agnosco procerem,” and to own that since his own day in this branch of learning, at least, we have made giant strides.

As the last and only surviving Editor of the Gentleman’s Magazine in its former shape, when it dealt with the intelligence and the literature of the age, and was a recognised organ of the educated world, I feel that it is my duty at this moment to put in a few words on behalf of a man whose literary merits have never been sufficiently acknowledged. With all his ruggedness and even “bearishness” of manner, what a contrast does he present to us, as he lives in Boswell, to the cross, crabbed, snappish, and selfish “philosopher of Chelsea,” who equalled him in nothing but in plodding industry, and surpassed him, me judice, in bearishness alone! And how few of the present generation are there who might not learn lessons of improvement, both moral and intellectual, by a careful and patient study of the “wit and wisdom” of Samuel Johnson!

E. Walford.